Today Stephen Robertson and I are announcing a new conference and peer-reviewed proceedings titled Current Research in Digital History, hosted (and funded) by RRCHNM and George Mason University’s Department of History and Art History. You can read the announcement at the RRCHNM website, and here is our brief description from the conference website:

Hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Current Research in Digital History is an annual one-day conference that publishes online, peer-reviewed proceedings. Its primary aim is to encourage and publish scholarship in digital history that offers discipline-specific arguments and interpretations. A format of short presentations provides an opportunity to make an argument on the basis of ongoing research in a larger project.

As a number of people have pointed out, most notably Cameron Blevins, digital history has a problem in that it rarely makes arguments or interpretations that advance conversations in historical fields. We intend for this conference and proceedings to be one part of an effort to encourage those kinds of arguments.

CRDH is also intended to be a publication venue for what we might call preliminary results. Let me give you a specific example. Kellen Funk and I have been working on tracking the migration of law in nineteenth-century U.S. codes of civil procedure for some time. While we are getting close to a final publication about those results and methods, we have had the basic argument down for quite a while. A venue like CRDH would let us not just present but also publish a mix of preliminary conclusions and method on the way to our larger argument. While that’s not the only kind of paper we anticipate digital historians might want to bring to CRDH, we do think preliminary results is one significant category that would be served by this kind of short-form publication.

We’ve gathered a program committee that I am very excited to be working with: Kalani Craig, Jessica Marie Johnson, Michelle Moravec, and Scott Weingart. We’re grateful to these four scholars for lending their time and expertise.

We’ve tried to think through very carefully what this conference and publication should look like, soliciting advice from a number of different people in the field. We’ve written up a fuller explanation of CRDH (PDF here). We hope you’ll take a look and then send us a paper for consideration.